Weiner 'can't say with certitude' photo isn't him

Rep. Anthony Weiner continued to refuse to answer questions late Wednesday afternoon on whether he is the man in a lewd photo that appeared on his Twitter page last week and continued to charge that his account had been hacked or otherwise manipulated.

At a wandering eight-minute press conference steps off the House floor, reporters pressed the New York Democrat to clarify his comments from earlier in the day, when a reporter from MSNBC asked him if the photo was of him and his response was: “You know, I can’t say with certitude.”

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“We know for sure I didn’t send this photograph,” Weiner said at the press conference. But when asked if he has taken suggestive photos of himself like the one that appeared on Twitter, he would say only: “There are photographs of me in the world, yes.”

In an interview minutes later with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Weiner again wouldn’t say that the photo was definitively not him. Rather, he said, “it certainly doesn’t look familiar to me.”

As he has since soon after news of the photo broke last Friday, Weiner insisted again Wednesday that his account had been broken into and that a hacker sent the photo of his crotch, in gray pants or shorts, to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle.

“My system was hacked, pictures can be manipulated, dropped in and inserted,” Weiner said on MSNBC. “One reason I asked a firm to look at what the heck happened here … is to see maybe something was manipulated, maybe something was dropped in.”

“We don’t know for sure what happened here,” he added. “But let’s try to take a step back. This is a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the internet, spoofed me, made fun of me, whatever. We’re taking it seriously in as much we want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

On Tuesday, a defensive Weiner shrugged off questions about whether he knew the young woman who received the photo, Gennette Nicole Cordova, but on Wednesday he said: “I don’t know the girl.” She, like the other 200 or so people he follows on Twitter, are “random,” Weiner said.